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A Reunion of Sorts: Two Pieces of Unpublished Austen Novel Are Both in New York

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A Reunion of Sorts: Two Pieces of Unpublished Austen Novel Are Both in New York

By Charles McGrath June 10, 2011 10:33 amJune 10, 2011 10:33 am

Beginning on Saturday the two manuscript parts of the unfinished and unpublished Jane Austen novel known as “The Watsons” will not be reunited, exactly, but will be closer they’ve been in almost 100 years — just 35 blocks or so from each other. The first part of the manuscript, some 12 pages, was sold during World War I to benefit the Red Cross, and now belongs to the Morgan Library & Museum. The rest, 68 pages which had been in private hands in England until recently, is going on display for a week at Sotheby’s before being shipped back to London, where it will be auctioned off in mid-July.

One of very few surviving Austen manuscripts, “The Watsons” is interesting for being extensively revised and corrected in her tiny, precise handwriting — evidence of Austen’s painstaking writing habits. You can see, for example, that after accusing the arrogant Lord Osborne of “carelessness” and “awkwardness,” she went back and added “coldness” for good measure.

Austen wrote “The Watsons” in 1804, a year before her father died and after the early versions of what eventually became “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Northanger Abbey.” Why she abandoned it is not clear. It’s by far the bleakest of her novels, however, and its story — of an impoverished young woman, with no marital prospects, whose sole friend is an ailing clergyman father — may have been uncomfortably close to the facts of Austen’s own life just then.